The Twitter superfan mob forgets that Woody Allen the filmmaker doesn't have to be intertwined with Woody Allen the human being (and alleged sexual abuser).

"Boy, I've Really Put You In A Tough Spot, Haven't I?" This fake op-ed by Woody Allen posted on The Onion recently voiced what's been perceived this past week as the hardcore Allen fan's current dilemma. A dilemma that's been intensified thanks to Dylan Farrow's disturbing and detailed open letter in The New York Times this week. Dylan, now 28, also links Allen's work to her allegations of sexual abuse: "What's your favorite Woody Allen movie?" she writes, before detailing the sexual abuse at Allen's hands that she allegedly suffered at the age of 7. For over twenty years, she's grown increasingly angry that people still worship Allen and don't seem to hear her. It's understandable.

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Since the letter ran, I've had many discussions (really, arguments) about Dylan's credibility. While it's unfathomable to me that you'd ever dismiss this kind of claim in a non-celebrity situation, lots of people insist she's been lying all of this time, that Mia Farrow coached her. The people who refuse to believe it are generally the same people who know Annie Hall dialogue by heart — the superfans. Twitter is rife with arguments about Dylan's claims, and the mob mentality of Allen's biggest fans is no different from Bieber fans or One Direction fans, really. They're unwilling to acknowledge that their hero might be capable of such a thing. He makes such good movies!

Finding it rather disturbing that searching for 'Dylan Farrow' on twitter brings up the auto-result 'Dylan Farrow lying' second.

This piece in The Guardian as well as this one in The Daily Beast (the latter penned by Bob Weide, who directed a fawning three-hour bio-documentary about Allen a few years ago) basically do everything but say that Dylan is lying. Weide also, more or less, accuses Mia Farrow of being an adulterous slut, as if that has anything to do with the sexual abuse allegations whatsoever. It's not Dylan but Mia who gets the brunt of the backlash.

Mia Farrow has consistently supported Roman Polanski, which is what makes all this a bit complicated. Also, Sinatra.

Some background: Allen was given the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes this year — with a second commendation by Diane Keaton, who accepted the award on his behalf and spoke at length about Allen's "unforgettable female characters" and championing of actresses. The decision to reward Allen for his 70 films, many of which are now classics, was criticized on Twitter by his ex-partner Mia Farrow and her son Ronan. Not because of Allen and Farrow's much-publicized early-1990s split and his later marriage to Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn (who was 19 when they began their relationship; Allen was 56), but because of Dylan's long-standing allegations of sexual abuse.

Allen's just one of many celebrated public figures with a history of unsavory and disturbing behavior, and it's evident that Hollywood and the public tends to turn on the victim rather than the celebrity. When fellow filmmaker/statutory rapist Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl in 1977, it was the girl — an L.A. pre-teen named Samantha Geimer — whose character, sexuality, and "poor parenting" came into question. Geimer, now in her forties, recalls: "At the time, everybody was saying that I was a liar, I was a slut, that my [aspiring actress] mom set it up and, poor Roman, we were these awful people. I was very aware of the negative portrayals of me."

Then there's R. Kelly, whose trespasses have gone mostly unacknowledged by the public after he was acquitted in an infamous 2008 child porn case. He had been sleeping with underage girls who hung around the studio for years, and the girl he had sex with and urinated on was just barely out of eighth grade. "That really puts it into perspective. She's not sophisticated enough to know what her kinks are," says journalist Jim DeRogatis, who broke the initial porn-tape story. Which was clearly an argument that some people had been making. During the actual trial, another woman came forward to identify the girl on the tape who had also slept with R. Kelly, when she was 17. She was called a liar by the defense team and actually accused of being Satan.

Allen's predilection for much younger, even legally too-young women has been very public for a long time, not just from the Soon-Yi debacle but the depiction of a 40-year-old man nonchalantly dating a 17-year-old girl in Manhattan. The sad truth is that if the only way Dylan Farrow can heal is for Hollywood to stop acknowledging Allen's accomplishments, she will continue to feel unheard.

People have been using Allen's highbrow cred as a filmmaker as some kind of defense of his personal integrity for a long time. Compare the Allen/Farrow sexual abuse allegations to the 1993 molestation allegations against Michael Jackson, for instance. The public was instantly on the side of the 13-year-old boy (one very notable exception to the instant celebrity support in these cases) and derailed Jackson's public image and commercial appeal. He never truly recovered. Why would this be the case with Jackson — also a hugely successful and critically-acclaimed artist — and not Allen? I think it's because Jackson was perceived as strange, deviant, and intellectually "stunted" due to his overall behavior, because he was black, and because the molestation victim was a boy. Allen, on the other hand, a white, intellectually superior New Yorker-reading academic, gets off relatively scot-free. We assume he's so smart he has to have some kind of reason for doing this that we don't even understand. He doesn't.

Ultimately, the mistake being made repeatedly — by both believers and skeptics about Dylan's allegations — is to think that Allen's deplorable actions change or negate the (sometimes) wonderful movies he's made. There's no need to choose a side or take down your Manhattan poster. Calling Dylan Farrow a liar because you want to justify your love for Woody Allen movies is an unnecessary personal attack.